500 days of Summer
Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Marc Webb scores well with this romantic comedy yet it is not the typical sweet romantic happy film. The romantic oxygen breathed here is different as relationship of boy meeting a girl does not end up as living happily ever after.
Film: 500 days of Summer
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tom, Zooey Deschanel as Summer, Geoffrey Arend as McKenzie, Chloe Moretz as Rachel, Matthew Gray Gubler as Paul, Clark Gregg as Vance, Patricia Belcher as Millie, Rachel Boston as Alison
Director: Marc Webb
Rating: 4/5
500 days of Summer explores a relationship between a boy and a girl from a different perspective. However, the movie runs in a cool mode punctuated with superb performance and great soundtrack.
The film unfolds with a break-up and the characters are Tom and Summer. Tom is a personality that believes all relationships are love based as true love is the driving force behind every gear of living and existence. His character is best suited to his work of writing greeting cards for a LA-based firm.
In his office he meets Summer who comes from just the opposite school of thought. For Summer, all relationships are casual and need based. There is no concept called true love and life moves on with sheer business of materialistic pleasure. From a brief narration of the background, audience also come to know of the fact that Summer hails from a broken family, and to her love is a fantasy that’s a subject in her childhood fairytale books.
The motion of the film is set with a sheer exploration of the relationship between Tom and Summer for 500 days, essentially from the viewpoint of Tom. Tom has grown up hearing Britty Pop music and misreading of The Graduate, so his character reflects misconception about love. Nonetheless Tom remains the hero of the movie.
The debutant director Marc Webb shuffles and reshuffles the 500 days relationship of Tom and Summer to portray the fun times they shared together and even the fault lines or cracks of the relationship. On day 500 of their relationship Summer dumps Tom to walk away from his life.
Summer was taken aback by the fact that Tom was unprepared for this reality. As Tom recollects the past days he realizes that he has allowed Summer to feminize him and on the other hand Summer was more dominant in their relationship.
It is under these circumstances that viewer sees Tom (as a matter of fact Tom sees himself) simply obsessed with Summer, admiring her every action and words in a way that he unintentionally and involuntarily gave up his first move advantage in every walk of life.
When they both get hooked on to each other, there appears one dance sequence in the park to the song of Hall and Oates’ You Make My Dreams Come True. The shot looked real cute but it simply reinforced Summer’s viewpoint that Love is fantasy and Tom looked more feminine.
It is when Tom got deeply bonded with the relationship with Summer that the split up happens. It was shocking for Tom, and he completely gets shattered and scenes of breaking dishes and crying on friend’s shoulders were not uncommon as signs of heartbreak and pain.
Whatever it was, Tom was obsessed with her, so he simply could not live without her thoughts. His thoughts oscillated from loathing her hair to loving her eyes. This had two levels of repercussions. One in which Tom was reduced to being a spectator to his life, and on the other in his memories he reduced Summer as a less dominant character who simply went powerless in front of his intense gaze.
All we can conclude is that Summer to be one She Monster but that doesn’t end there we will count on Tom’s perspective as one privileged one, but a balance is called upon as Tom gets a chance to meet Summer to question as to why their relationship did not blossom.
This particular moment was not only intense but honest too, as the recollections of the relationship was only Tom’s version of understanding it. There was Summer’s version too, no matter how different it was but it was true and most importantly it was recognized by Tom.
